China blocks access to YouTube

China appears to have once again blocked access to YouTube. Google, which owns the popular video sharing site, said it began noticing a decline in traffic from the country on Monday and was totally blocked by Tuesday. The Chinese government has not directly addressed this issue but many are speculating the ban is an attempt to prevent citizen access to recent videos depicting alleged brutality by Chinese police in Tibet.

It's not the first time users in China have been unable to access the site, though, as similar Tibetan protest videos last year led the country to block domestic access to the site. Civil rights groups have long been pressuring the country to relax its controls on web content, but they seem to maintain that the Internet needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent “the spread of harmful information.”